Alternatives to h.264?

cameronchapman · Dec 15, 2013

I'm screening a music video at a local bar next weekend, on a projector with a fairly sizable screen. I've tried a few different bit rate settings with the h.264 codec, but there's one shot where it's making the compression artifacts in the original clip 800x worse. I mean, it's not great in the original, but this is just downright ugly.

Reshooting isn't an option at this point. And I don't really have time to do a whole lot on the footage itself. The uncompressed output is acceptable, but it's nearly a 30GB file and it bogs down my MacBook way too much. I obviously need smooth playback for this.

So what's my best bet for keeping the file size to under 1GB without making the artifacts quite so awful? I'm working with Adobe Premiere Pro, and the file will be playing on my MacBook connected via VGA to the projector, so pretty much anything is on the table. Thanks!

Zensteve · Dec 15, 2013

What is it about the one segment that makes the video look so bad?

How does it look, in mpeg2 format? Dunno what version of Adobe you're running, but mpeg works really well on that (native format for HD, for CS4 at any rate)

Can you burn an hq DVD, and just play the DVD from your laptop?

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PaulGriffith · Dec 15, 2013

Have you tried a high bitrate H264, like 30-50mbps?

ProRes is a great option. I probably would do HQ 422, but try standard pro-res and see what the file size and playback is like.

Keep in mind, you'll want to try it on the actual playback computer to see if it has the codecs and bandwidth to playback smoothly (if it's different than your laptop).

tokenwhiteboy · Dec 15, 2013

JPEG A

jax_rox · Dec 15, 2013

Decent bitrate H.264 shouldn't make your issue 800x worse

In any case, I'd rather use something like ProRes or DNxHD, depending on what codecs you have installed.

mus · Dec 15, 2013

Sounds like whatever settings you're using is what is making it worse, not the fact that it's h.264

cameronchapman · Dec 15, 2013

Thanks for the suggestions! I'm going to set it to render in a few of the formats suggested and will let you guys know which one seems to work best.

cameronchapman · Dec 15, 2013

I used QuickTime to convert an uncompressed version of the video and that seems to be the winner. The final file size is around 0.8GB, and it has the fewest artifacts and the least noise. And it plays back fine. Thanks for all the help!

ItDonnedOnMe · Dec 16, 2013

Which codec did you end up converting to though?

wheatgrinder · Dec 16, 2013

render best quality MOV format
Use handbrake with HIGH preset for h264 encode. See if that improves.

wheatgrinder · Dec 16, 2013

oh, just saw your solution.. its about the same. The idea being to encode h264 separately.
Next thing you can play with is muxing your audio and video separately.

This lets me render video and audio separately. If I need to do a remix, I dont have to render the video again, just the audio, then mux it together, then burn h264..

cameronchapman · Dec 16, 2013

ItDonnedOnMe said:
Which codec did you end up converting to though?

It converts it to H.264. But seems to do a better job of it than doing it directly with Adobe Media Encoder.

IndiePaul · Dec 19, 2013

Cameron, we need to submit to festivals and have shot on a Canon 6D so our footage is h.264 too.

We have Adobe Media Encoder too. Using a PC and Premier Pro for the editing.

The QuickTime encoder you used, I assume it was not a free one?

We'll give that a try and the other options that wheatgrinder etc have suggested.

For the festival, we obviously want the best quality we can get on a DVD. If dual-layer DVDs are allowed, we'll use those because they have higher capacity.
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